


On Pins & Needles

by recoveringrabbit



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, during 'We Had Time', home ec travails
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:48:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25729219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recoveringrabbit/pseuds/recoveringrabbit
Summary: In which Jemma tries to prepare for the unknown—or the perfectly known, and undesired.[a 'We Had Time' emotional study]
Relationships: Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons
Comments: 14
Kudos: 71





	On Pins & Needles

**Author's Note:**

> This fic brought to you by the title, which dropped into my head about 11:30 one night and demanded a fic be written, and my continuing efforts to master the skills of a 40s homefront heroine.

They say yes to Enoch’s measured plea, of course. There hadn’t really been a chance they wouldn’t—not because he had just saved their lives, again, but because they always say yes. Since the moment SHIELD fell the first time, they’ve done the next thing asked of them, and the next, and the next, no matter what it demands they give—emotionally, ethically, personally, Jemma and Fitz have literally given their lives in SHIELD’s service. And now Enoch asks them for one more effort to make sure all those sacrifices are worth it.

They’ve set a dangerous precedent, Jemma realizes once the scope of the job ahead of them becomes clear. But if they hadn’t ever said no before, how could they do so now?

So they say yes. Yes to the years of their lives toiling on one project. Yes to the constant threat from Chronicom hunters. Yes to the time travel. Yes to the separation. Really, they can’t do anything else.

“Sometimes,” Fitz says one night in the workshop, his face drawn and his eyes rimmed with deep purple shadows, “d’you ever wish we had told Coulson ‘no’ at the beginning? We wouldn’t be here now if we had.”

If they had done that, they probably would have died at SciOps when Hydra took over, but saying so would hardly be helpful. Instead, she offers a brave smile. She doesn’t allow herself any other kind these days. “Oh, I don’t know. ‘Here’ has its benefits.”

He glances around the room at the tech they’re working with, tech they couldn’t even dream of at SciOps, and makes a face. “I’d give all this up for a little peace and quiet.”

“So would I, but that’s not what I meant.”

Wholly exhausted, he still doesn’t understand until she comes to stand right in front of him, putting her hands on his face to direct his mouth to hers. That wakes him up, as she expected. His eyelids flutter closed as he leans into the kiss; his arms wrap around her as though he would tuck her into his heart if he could. He is everything she loves in any reality.

Their foreheads rest together even when their lips part, and Jemma looks up at him patiently, remembering another worn-down Fitz. But this one, when he opens his eyes, smiles before turning his face to kiss the inside of her wrist. “Good point, wife. We’ll get through the rest of it eventually. You can’t say”—he huffs out something that could almost be a laugh—“we don’t have time to figure it out.”

She hums her own not-quite-laugh and glides her thumb across his cheek. “It’s a bit of a luxury, isn’t it?”

“It is.” He sways forwards to kiss her again, deep and strong. It leaves her a little breathless, and she chases after him when he pulls away, lingering on the corner of his smirk. “I know how you feel about having adequate time for preparation.”

That makes her laugh, for real, and he grins back, his pleasure driving the last of his clouds away. This time when she kisses him, neither of them allows themselves to think of anything but the sweetness of the present moment.

In some ways, it’s like the old days: the two of them, a lab, new discoveries every day. If she let herself, she could easily grow complacent, forget the end goal of all this work and be satisfied with Fitz and science, in that order. But that’s the one thing she mustn’t do. Every single step of this audacious plan is fraught with danger—as Enoch regularly reminds them—and this is, astoundingly, the easy bit. Once they’ve finished this, the terribly difficult part will begin.

So, being long accustomed to the prospect of terribly difficult tasks, she does what she has always done to keep from being destroyed by them, and prepares.

* * *

First it’s the library books: general histories of 20th century America, which of course she never learnt; photo retrospectives of cities; popular (not literary) novels; dictionaries of slang. She learns how to do American crosswords from eight different decades, memorizes the presidents, forms opinions on Judy Garland’s career. To give herself a rest, she digs up the flashcards she made on SHIELD history at the Academy and makes Fitz run them with her while she’s doing something else that allows for split attention—vacuuming their two-room flat off the edge of the lab, or showering, or trying and failing to fall asleep. He bears it with patience at first, glad to hear interesting facts she’s picked up and laughing at the outrageous slang she’s trying out, even if she can see the fond exasperation in the corner of his mouth. The longer it goes, though, the less fond his exasperation becomes.

“Haven’t you memorized these cards by now?” he asks after dinner, snapping the rubber band that holds the fat stack together. “Not just the information. I mean memorized them word for word.”

Pausing her thorough scrub of the casserole pot, she sends a mildly indignant glare over her shoulder to where he sits at the kitchen table. “They have to be word perfect, Fitz. It’s the details that give you away. If one of us says something wrong—”

“—you’ll cover, that’s what you know to do.”

“What Daisy knows, you mean—”

“—just like any other time—”

“Deke will be comfortable improvising, I’m sure—”

“—not like you haven’t done it before.”

“Time-travelled? Really, Fitz.”

“Yeah, Jemma, you have.”

She drops the sponge into the sudsy pot and turns to face him, but he’s staring fixedly at the tabletop, his jaw set. “When have I—” she begins, until something about the slump of his shoulders reminds her of their impossible grandson and she knows. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

They still tread carefully here; the jaunt she made to the future and back weighs down their steps through it.

“It’s the same,” he says, finally, “just because you’re going backwards this time—it’s the same skillset.”

She watches the Fairy bubbles pop, their molecular cohesion not enough to keep them together. “That didn’t work out very well, Fitz.”

“But not because of anything you did. You can’t help being subjects of a prophecy.” A glance, a flicker of a smile. “And how many of those people knew you didn’t belong? You looked right, that was the important thing.”

“Thanks to Deke.”

“Well, you’ll have him again.”

Deke will do his best, she knows. He won’t be enough. Slowly, she dries her hands on the tea towel and moves across the kitchen to the table. Once there, she twists her hands together to keep from reaching for Fitz. “This is different, though. We can’t just keep our heads down and wait for you to rescue us. We’ll be dealing with real people and they _can’t know_. If we had Coulson—”

Mouth thin, he shakes his head; now isn’t the time for that discussion. “If you look the part,” he says again, “you can bluff the rest. Enoch will help you.”

“I don’t want Enoch’s help,” she grumbles.

“Of course you don’t.” He reaches out then, picking up her left hand and turning her ring around with his thumb. “Just think about it. You don’t have to do everything alone.”

Oh, she thinks with a sharp pang, but she will. Still, for his sake—a reason worth doing anything—she promises to consider what he said. And, reflecting that night as he sleeps beside her and she stares into the darkness listening to him breathe, she realizes he has a good point: it’s past time for her to expand her course of study. It’s unlikely they’ll have to make small talk about the Brooklyn-or-Los Angeles Dodgers, but they will have to be able to move about in the time without looking out-of-place. And who will be responsible for that? Certainly not a sentient Chronicom from the planet Chronica II.

She rises the next morning before Fitz does—to say _wakes_ would imply she slept more than a few minutes together—and writes out a list of all the practical, physical skills she must learn to successfully lead the team through a hundred years of history without arousing suspicion. A second list shortly follows, naming the supplies she will need to achieve these goals. Though it’s rather a lot, she doesn’t feel daunted. So what if she’s never done any of this before? Nothing about this entire rotten situation has precedence. Except for the one thing she has ample practice in, too much practice, frankly—but she shoves that reminder away.

* * *

Enoch takes her supply list and procures the items without more than a raised eyebrow, though since that does seem to be his permanent expression, she can’t decide whether he approves or disagrees with her course of action.

“I cannot say that I have ever concerned myself with such activities,” he admits as he hands her the box full of goods. “Perhaps the awareness of appearance is yet another human trait I lack.”

Jemma supposes that, when a being can change its skin without much trouble, it wouldn’t care very much about the shape of a hat or the height of a hem. She, however, does not have that luxury, and neither does the rest of the team. Fortunately, she does have a plan. With supplies now in hand, she begins immediately to set up her station, pulling a chair under the bedroom window where the light comes in most of the day and arranging a small table for her scissors, pincushion, and cup of tea nearby.

She’s already there the next morning when Fitz, fresh from the shower and rummaging in the wardrobe, asks “why do all my shirts seem to have vanished?”

She looks guiltily at the pile of mostly blue cloth on the floor beside her chair—had she really not left him one? “Oh, I’ve got them here, Fitz.”

He shoots her a confused eyebrow quirk as he drips over, bending to snag one off the top. One arm makes it all the way in before he realizes the problem. “Where are the buttons?”

Holding up the needle in one hand and the shirt she’s working on in the other, she offers a rueful smile. “I’m practicing sewing on buttons in case...in case. So I’ve taken off yours to begin.”

His confused eyebrow becomes two, but he shrugs out of the sleeve and reaches down for a different shirt. Knowing what he’ll find, she bites her lip and concentrates on winding thread around the underside of the button to create the little stem that will allow it to slip easily through the buttonhole. She can feel the moment when he stiffens and spots the row of notions on the side table.

“Er, Jemma. All the shirts?”

“Not on purpose, but...it seems so.”

He looks at her, hands on his hips. The sun coming through the window catches goldly on the water droplets in his hair. “Okay,” he says in the end, and goes back to the wardrobe to pull a jumper on for the day. As he hops on one foot to put on his socks, she has never loved him more.

Buttons proving straightforward enough, after reattaching everything she’s detached—a tedious task—she moves on. Days are spent debating time travel theory and trying to invent a way to bring a mostly-dead person back to life; nights are spent with swatch books and tissue-thin sewing patterns. She gratefully gives up dressmaking after Fitz reasonably points out they’ll hardly have time to make clothes from scratch for everyone, but continues her pursuit of the invisible slip stich and develops a working knowledge of how to choose the appropriate mending tools for any project. Learning to tie a knot in her thread with a simple slide of her fingers gives her a sense of victory almost unmatched in her experience. The domestic arts, she reflects, have a certain satisfaction. She would never, not for anything, choose a different career than the one she has—how else would she have Fitz? Still, she appreciates how one’s efforts result in a comforting tidiness. And it’s marvelous to be able to rescue things.

* * *

Of course, mending skills only comprise a portion of her list. With any luck, they won’t need to sew on a button or do up a tear—though Jemma is more than familiar with their luck, if there was any such a thing, and thus prides herself on her ability to fix a three-cornered rip with only a tiny bit of fusible interfacing. No, far more important to the success of their mission will be keeping the civilian populace from realizing they don’t belong the instant they step off the Zephyr. It’s all about hiding the seams. Or, in some cases, not hiding them.

“Are my seams straight?” she asks Fitz, wishing desperately for a full-length mirror. She hasn’t needed one before, but it’s impossible to tell anything about the back of one’s own leg.

He answers distractedly, still mostly concentrated on the computer simulation he’s running for the twelfth time: “What?” Then, looking up, he catches sight of what she’s asking about and chokes. “What. What are those, Jemma?”

She should probably roll her eyes at the typically male response, but he _is_ her husband and there’s few enough opportunities these days to see him with that gap-jawed, awestruck expression. Something in her zings pleasantly—well, why not? Giving modern feminism a lick and a promise by not striking a pose, as she half wants to, she merely lifts the hem of her skirt a modest few centimeters and turns her back to give him a better view. “Stockings, obviously.”

He comes around the bench and approaches slowly, not taking his eyes off her legs. “And, erm. Why—to what do I owe—”

“They’re not for you. They’re for later. I’m attempting to determine”— he reaches her and drops to one knee, the better to observe—“whether we _must_ wear garter belts and clips, or if tights-style will suffice. I can’t imagine Daisy or Elena being very happy with wearing them at all, never mind May, but—”

The end of her sentence disappears when he wraps his hands around her ankles, placing his thumbs over the seams and sliding them gently up towards the backs of her knees. A shiver runs all the way up her spine and fuzzes out her brain, a bit, but she hears him through the pleasant hum. “No, I’d rather not imagine May in these.”

“No?” Her voice comes out much more breathy than she’d prefer. “Well, I expect she won’t be going out much, at first.”

Hyperaware of the delicate brush of his fingers, she notices instantly when one of his hands leaves her calf; it’s only gone a moment, though, before it joins its partner to carefully tug at the seam and smooth the fabric around her leg. “If you don’t want to attract attention, wife, you won’t go out much, ever. Any man with eyes in his head would notice you in these.”

Her brain supplies an _ugh, Fitz_ , but the rest of her body feels rather like putty under his tender ministrations. “Well, I’ll be too busy to notice them.”

“And that will keep them from noticing you?” His thumbs resume their exploratory path, down the thin ridge of her ankle and slowly, agonizingly, up towards her hem. “Fat chance. They’ll come up to you in bars and on the street: ‘excuse me, miss, can’t help but notice what a great set of pins you’ve got’—”

“Pins!”

She turns to face him, not moving so quickly that she pulls away from his grasp but quickly enough that she spares half a thought to the effect his calloused fingers could have on the delicate silk; the other half of the thought doesn’t care. Cupping her ankles loosely, he allows her to move but doesn’t look up.

“That’s what the slang is, isn’t it? Or gams? Or—”

“Fitz!” she protests, laughing, “stop saying nonsense, you were being so suave and sexy moment ago—”

“Aaand there it is.” His face lifts triumphantly, mouth curved and eyes light— _enormously_ pleased with himself, though she doesn’t see why.

“There what is? You can’t possibly be fishing for a compliment, you know I think—”

“A man likes to hear it anyway.” He lets go her legs and rises to his feet, soothing her regret by placing one hand on her hip and the other to her cheek, where his thumb caresses the corner of her mouth. “But I meant this.” With two fingers, he smooths a line over her forehead. “And this. Haven’t seen you smile in a bit now.”

Her hands, which had been reaching for him, stop in the space between them and begin to twist together, almost without her knowing it. She can’t meet his gaze. “There haven’t been a great many reasons to smile, if you’ll recall.”

“I do,” he says, “so I thought I’d give you one.”

If that isn’t so _Fitz_ —finding funny videos on the internet when she was spiraling the night before their field assessments; making understated observations when their attempts at miracle working fell through; cracking jokes when the weight of her love for him threatens to crush her beneath it. She knows, when she returns her eyes to his, what she will find: tenderness, patience, hopefulness. _Let me help you_ , he’s always saying. And he has, every time. Every time he’s been there, at least. If she was putty before, she’s a puddle now, and she all but collapses into his shoulder. “There’s just so much, Fitz.”

His arms come tightly around her shoulders, fifteen years’ worth of practice making the motion a muscle memory. “There’s always so much. But if we don’t take the chance to laugh now”—when we’ve got time, he doesn’t say—“when will we do it?”

She wishes, more than anything, that she could tell him.

“I mean,” he continues, “obviously, the situation isn’t _ideal_ , but I can’t think of a time in our whole relationship where things couldn’t get better.”

“Sci-Ops,” she says, hoping she doesn’t actually sound like she’s fighting back tears.

“No way. No kissing at Sci-Ops.”

She begins to smile in spite of herself. “What about just after we got together, when—”

“When you were the SADIST and I was spending all my time with a morally grey—at _best_ —inventor who thought he could defy a hundred years of robot stories? No thank you.”

“I suppose, when you put it like that.”

“Exactly.” She can feel his firm nod against her head. “You’re the one who told me now isn’t so terrible. At least here you aren’t having to fight off dapper gits who will try all kinds of methods to get your attention.”

He chuckles, but not really; she isn’t even tempted. And yet somehow, even with the reminder of what these ridiculous stockings are meant for—it’s easy enough to take his comment in the spirit he intended, rising to meet him as they always do. “There’s only one man who can get anywhere with me with any method whatsoever—and he actually can _use_ any method whatsoever.”

“Lucky chap,” Fitz says.

She pulls back to find his eyes now decidedly less gentle and more heated, though still and always hopeful. “Oh, I’m the lucky one—he’s got very clever hands, you know.”

His arms drop from her shoulders to her waist, those clever hands finding their natural places at the small of her back and reeling her purposefully against him. Everywhere they touch, she can feel him tight with anticipation. “Put those to good use, does he?”

“Yes,” she murmurs, watching him draw closer until he’s literally a breath away. “I wouldn’t trust anyone else to make sure my stockings are straight.”

He stops, eyelashes almost brushing hers as they open in surprise, and she is treated to one of her favorite sights in the whole world: his pure, delighted, joyful grin. “Guess he’d better get pretty familiar with them, then.”

They distract each other that night, all their playfulness only a thin veneer to a tenderness that would make Jemma cry if she hadn’t promised herself not to let these times be spoilt with tears. If she’s going to waste time crying, it isn’t going to be when she has other alternatives available to her. And she isn’t going to waste time crying at all, if she can help it.

* * *

Clothing only makes up half of the look, and the rest—well, the rest nearly makes Jemma pull her hair out simply so she doesn’t have to worry about it and can rely on a series of wigs. Her vanity still being strong, however, she resists and dives back into research. There’s nothing she can do for Mack—Fitz agrees that it’s nearly impossible to imagine him with hair, though he would no doubt still be handsome—and Deke is a white man and will therefore be above comment, she expects. As always, the burden of appearance falls on the women.

“Of course it’s unfair,” Fitz agrees, leaning on the counter watching her slather cake mascara—cake _mascara_ , of all things!—onto her left eyelashes, “but don’t you think you’re taking it a bit far? You can get cosmetics there, surely, if you need them.”

She would give him a disbelieving look, but her eyelashes are stuck together and it wouldn’t have the right impact. “And who is to buy them? Shall we send Deke in to the five-and-dime with a list of four foundation colors and expect him to pick the correct shade of corral for Elena’s skin tone?”

“They aren’t here, though,” he argues, “so you can’t exactly pick them out perfectly, either. And don’t they know how to put on makeup, anyway?”

“Ugh, Fitz. Makeup has its fashions just like clothing. Imagine trying to wear blue eye shadow now, or brown lipstick in 1920. It isn’t done. I’ve got to know it all.”

“Or you could just look it up online when you get there.”

“And who is to practice applying it? Enoch?”

“He could,” Fitz mumbles as he pushes himself off the counter and pads over to kiss the top of her head. “Come as soon as you’re done, yeah? I could really use your help. If you can see through all that goop.”

Jemma has to take a deep breath as he leaves; he hasn’t chastised her in any way, but she feels the rebuke all the same. He has been working terribly hard lately, feeling every day like he’s just on the verge of a breakthrough—which he isn’t, poor Fitz, there’s a reason no one has invented time travel yet—and she hasn’t been as present as she ought to be. Well, she’s been terribly busy too. Her own part of the work Enoch’s set them would be enough to fill two lifetimes, not to mention all the rest she’s doing because he hasn’t thought of it and there’s no one else who will be able to.

Blinking fiercely, she returns her attention to the mirror and twists open the tube of thick black mascara. Ideally, one won’t be able to tell the difference between this modern product and the cake stuff; it’s going to be far easier if they can utilize familiar application methods, at least. A bit easier, at least, but every bit that isn’t a struggle will allow them to save their energy for the things that are.

Fitz doesn’t comment on her mascara and Enoch, when he sees her, cants his head curiously but says only “Jemma Simmons, you look very like a low-ranking member of the Torreliican royal family” which, though possibly insulting, at least doesn’t indicate that the difference between the two is terribly obvious. She makes an executive decision to primarily use tube mascara for ease and take cake mascara in case they receive funny looks in the street. Her cosmetics collection could fill the Quinjet on its own, she feels, but she sees no other choice. One must be prepared for all eventualities.

“Who’re you trying to impress?” Fitz has perched on the edge of their bed, clutching a pillow to his chest and peering through the open bathroom doorway to meet her eyes in the mirror. They’ve called it an early night in the lab after a particularly nasty explosion set them back two weeks at least and covered them in plasma to boot; he let her have the first shower and she saw an opportunity to practice period-appropriate hair care while hers was still wet. He may have had other ideas for the evening, but had clearly resigned himself to wait when he saw her frowning at her reflection. It’s happened often enough over the past weeks that he knows she won’t be wheedled out of it.

She spares him a fleeting glance, her attention firmly on the book propped open in front of her. “I’m not trying to impress anyone, I’m trying to ensure we blend entirely into the background. Hairstyles are noticeable and easily described.”

“You’ve said.”

“Then I really don’t see why I have to explain it again.” She picks up the next section of hair and begins wrapping it around her fingers, trying to make a neat, tight coil that will lay flat against her head and match the three already lined up on either side of her part. The first rows are always easiest; the pattern doesn’t begin until the second set.

“But do you have to do it now?” He chucks the pillow towards the head of the bed, getting to his feet and coming to stand in the bathroom doorway. “I know you’re halfway through”—a generous estimate, which he knows as well as she does—“but you could just leave it.”

The nascent curl drops from her fingers; she huffs, frustrated, and starts again. “It would look ridiculous.”

“What difference does it make? I never think you look ridiculous, and Enoch always does.”

Though he makes a fair point, she’s too concerned with making sure the ends of her hair stay tucked into the forming curl to respond directly. As she pats them into place, the whole thing unravels; she purses her lips and starts again.

“I thought you had pin curls mastered.”

Frustrated as she is, her first reflex is to snap back; Fitz and his curls that only grow more wild with age could never understand the skill it takes to do this kind of thing, and it’s mean of him to point out her failures. But when she finds his face in the mirror, there’s no unkindness or criticism. He’s actually not looking at her at all, intensely concentrated on the doorjamb’s peeling paint. There’s a real question there, then, and it deserves a real answer. She takes a breath to smooth the sharp edge from her voice. There’s no point in picking a fight. Not now. “I’m learning patterns to make the appropriate waves. You have to twist the hair the opposite direction; it requires a great deal of coordination and practice to make it look right.”

As if to prove her point, the curl reaches her scalp at an angle that she knows from experience will result in hair sticking straight out from her head like a flag, so she lets it go a third time. Perhaps if she wets her hair again...

“If it’s waves you’re after, why not use a waving wand like you normally do, instead of all this pinning and clipping and mousse?”

He gestures at the paraphernalia spread over the counter, which is—she admits—frankly ridiculous, and certainly far more than she ever used on her hair before. She can’t imagine having go through this process every night. Would it ever get quicker? Did one’s husband just become used to falling asleep without one, or did one become used to going about one’s life without reference to him? Nestling the new curl into position, she jabs it with an alligator clip and sets her jaw before moving on to the next one. “Waving wands don’t make the correct shape. It’s got to be wet-set to look right.”

“I could make you a waving wand that’s the correct shape.”

“Of course you could, but is that really the best use of your time?”

“Is this the best use of yours?”

Her eyes jerk to meet his in the mirror. Where before had been honest questions, now his gaze is warm with indignation and not a little accusation—to some extent earned, she mustn’t pretend otherwise, but he’s also _willfully obtuse_ not to acknowledge what she’s attempting to do here. Certainly, if she was devoting hours to her appearance for nothing but her own vanity, he would have reason to be upset, but to suggest that preparing to exist in a world without—that is, a world so totally foreign to anything they’ve known before— “We agreed to be done in the lab today,” she grits out, “so I’m not neglecting—“

“That’s not what I meant—”

“Then say—oh, _damn_!”

Fitz jumps, his mouth already forming a _what_ shape as she reaches up to yank out the just-placed alligator clip. Stupid, stupid thing, horrid, idiotic process— “The curl went the wrong way,” she bites out towards a concerned Fitz without looking at him, “it won’t set right. That’s the fourth time I’ve done this one. I know it’s silly to be so upset about it, but after everything today—”

Concentrating on wrapping the curl _again_ , _correctly_ this time, she misses that Fitz has moved until she feels his hand on her shoulder, then covering one of hers. His clean, safe smell fills her lungs and she almost holds her breath to keep it, stilling in the way his presence allows her to do. With the other hand, he reaches around to pull her reference book into his sight line. “Let me help,” he says into her ear.

She shivers, unable to keep herself from moving into his touch as he begins running his fingers through her hair. “I’ve got to do it myself.”

“Hmm.” He hums, twisting the pesky end around a nimble thumb and finger. “Didn’t they go to beauty parlours back then? I bet even Peggy Carter had her hair done sometimes.”

Oh, a clever ploy, bringing up Peggy Carter. She feels herself melting back into his body behind her, fully ready to close her eyes and let him have his way. It would be easier with his help. Everything is.

Instead, she straightens and turns her hand to clasp his, trying with the press of her fingers to reassure him. “But I will have to do this myself, when I do it. I have to, Fitz.”

He is quiet for a minute, holding her eyes deep and unfathomable. Then he sighs, propping his chin on her shoulder and closing his eyes. “All right. All right. But do you have to do it tonight?”

She knows, from the line of his mouth and the timbre of his voice, that he will accept whatever she says she must do. He always has, whether patiently or begrudgingly; he trusts her judgment and respects her autonomy, and of all the many things she loves about him that invariably ranks near the top. However. She trusts his judgment, too, and more than that wants him to be well and happy more than almost anything else in life. So instead of saying “yes, I do”—even though there is not enough time before she will need the skill, never enough time—she turns her face towards his and kisses his temple. “No. Not tonight. I’ll take these down and then let’s wash some trash telly like every other thirty-something couple with no money who’ve had bad days at work.”

His chin digs into her shoulder as he relaxes. She doesn’t care. “Thank you, Jemma,” he says, as though he knows what it cost her to say it. “I love you.”

She is grateful that his eyes are closed and cannot see the sudden tide of tears ebbing into hers. “And I love you, husband.”

* * *

She tries, after that. No matter the pressure they’re under, they can’t let every moment be taken up with work, or they’ll lose the only good thing they’ve got left. She should have learnt that long ago. And perhaps it’s better, anyway, to leave the lab and her own preparations to sort themselves out every now and again; they need time to refresh and remind themselves what they’re working for.

One night—or perhaps early morning; they’ve been with Enoch all day and Chronicoms don’t understand the passage of time very well—they’ve collapsed into bed fully-clothed, tired to the bone. Fitz has his face buried in his pillow; she lies on her side with her face buried in him, one hand stroking up and down his spine. Her other hand clasps his bad one between them, holding it tight through its exhausted tremors. His cardigan is lumpy but warm. It rises and falls as he breathes. That’s all she knows, at the moment. Her brain passed its limits of new information hours ago and her mind may as well have been wiped clean. She is here, Fitz is here. Nothing more matters at present.

She can feel his heavy sigh in her own body and moves slightly back on the pillow, knowing the sigh signifies a conversation will be shortly forthcoming. Sure enough, he turns his face towards her a moment later, though the rest of his form stays as it is. “If you had told me, five years ago or whenever it was, that I would wish for a monolith, I would have assumed you had one of those identity masks.”

Her stomach drops like a lead balloon, heavy and dead. “Don’t say that.”

“Obviously they caused a lot of problems, but you have to admit they did the moving through time and space thing efficiently.”

Oh yes, very efficiently, and left her on one side and him on the other for months and years because no one could make the bloody things do anything except what they—because apparently those three slabs of phase-shifting granite had some sort of sentience—wanted to do, which seemed to be nothing but to keep her, Jemma Simmons, from living a straightforward life. Her lips purse and her teeth make a tight cage around the words that want to spill out.

Fitz, his eyes still closed, keeps going. “Hard to think of a way to get the Zephyr through, but if we had one to study—”

“Well, we don’t. It’s no use talking about it.”

Blue eyes fly open; twin eyebrows raise. “I didn’t really mean—”

“Even so. I don’t want to think about monoliths now.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t bring work home.”

One corner of his mouth quirks up, sheepish and fond. Usually that smile is enough to blot the ledger, but her body is too tense to forget just like that. Since she knows he means it, though, she wills herself to relax her jaw and resume rubbing his back. The simple motion serves to ground her, as good as watching waves roll in and out or a circle expand or contract. Up: She loves Fitz. Down: She doesn’t want to be cross with him. Up: She loves Fitz.

As though he can hear the unspoken words, he hums a contented response. His eyes drift closed again, and he shuffles on the pillow until his forehead touches hers. She lets her eyes close too, taking long deep breaths of the air they share between them. One breath, she thinks. It’s enough after all.

“I wish we could...”

Fitz starts, and stops, so quietly she isn’t sure he means to say more. There hardly needs to be more. She wishes too. “Yes?”

“I wish we could just figure it out and get started. This waiting around is almost worse than the thing itself.”

Her hand clenches in a fist at the small of his back as she sits up sharply, pulling his cardigan with her. “Mmph,” he says, “what is it? Did you figure out—”

“You’ve got a hole. Or, at least, it’s going to be a hole.”

“I do?” Getting up on his elbows, he cranes his neck to see what she’s found—a futile effort between the angle and the shadowy room and the fact that she hasn’t let go. “Well, it’s old. Good for the lab.”

“Give it here. I’ll mend it.”

“What?”

She’s already swung her legs over the side of the bed and moved to flick on the overhead light by the time he pushes to one elbow, his forehead wrinkled with concern. Her back is to him, but she knows. “Jemma, it’s fine.”

“Oh yes,” she says briskly, retrieving her mending basket, “of course it’s fine now, but a stitch in time saves nine. I’ll just put in a quick darn and you won’t have to worry about it again.”

Propping the basket on one hip, she turns with her hand outstretched for the cardigan. Fitz is still, save for the thoughts she can see racing across his face. She is so, so weary; if he presses her at all— _Don’t_ , she pleads, _just do it_.

Slowly, he sits up and starts peeling off the offending garment. “Can’t it wait though,” he says as he hands it over, “ ’til tomorrow, or later. I have others.”

She drapes it over her arm, fussing with the folds to avoid meeting his still-worried eyes. Wait? Hadn’t he just said he wanted to get on with it? “Never put off until tomorrow, Fitz! Who knows what time we’ll have then.”

“Jemma—”

“Please, Fitz. It’ll be good practice for later.”

A long, silent second passes. No doubt he is scrubbing his hands over his face or pinching the bridge of his nose or one of the things he does when he is tired and can’t solve the problem in front of him—she’s seen it often enough, recently, to feel it in the air—but rather than argue back or try another tack, he lets her go. “But sleep sometime, yeah? You can’t go forever with no rest.”

“As soon as I’m done,” she promises. “You sleep now. I’ll go in the other room not to bother you.”

Flicking out the light, she makes her way into the main room and settles herself on the sofa in the soft circle of the table lamp. A perusal of the worn spot shows, to her satisfaction, that there are enough remaining threads to ensure a darn will nip the problem in the bud. An hour’s work, and she won’t have to worry about Fitz going around with holey cardigans while she’s—

“It’s just, why are you even worried about all this?”

Fitz has appeared in the doorway, his hair going every direction, another cardigan pulled over his pajamas. His thumb digs into his left palm, whether from habit or need she can’t say. Either way, he’s uncomfortable. She pulls her thread taut to match his shoulders, then curses softly as she has to unpick it. The stitches can’t be too tight or they’ll rip with the first bit of strain and make the hole worse. “You know why, Fitz. We talked about it. It was your idea!”

“No. Not like this. Not like you spending every spare moment becoming your granny—no, she didn’t even mend like this, did she? I know she didn’t wear pin curls or stockings.”

A flush rises to her face—not embarrassment, but the sheer effort of keeping her stitches and tone even. “It’s got to be done right, Fitz, or it may as well not be done at all.”

“Okay,” he says, “but will it be done at all? You’re acting like it’s going to be the Bus all over again, and you and Daisy will have time between fighting Chronicoms to do each other’s hair and fill up the questionnaires in teen magazines—”

She tightens her jaw and returns her attention to her work, weaving the needle through the warp and weft like her life depends upon it. “Thank you, I believe I completely understand the demands of the situation.”

But he persists: “It isn’t going to be a leisurely punt through the time stream—”

“We don’t know what it’ll be, Fitz, that’s the whole reason—”

“—when exactly will it be your top priority to patch a hole in Mack’s trousers—”

“When exactly is it not my top priority to take care of people?”

“Oh, is that what you’re doing?”

“What do you think I’m doing?”

“Damned if I know! You won’t have time—”

It’s too much. _Everything_ is too much. The tears burst out of her—literally burst, with a violent keening noise that she only half-manages to catch in the jumper as she buries her face in its capacious sleeves. It’s a miracle she escapes the needle, which is no doubt dangling uselessly from the thin thread, just like her ability to do _any_ of this.

“Jemma,” he says, and then he is there, like always, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her head to her place on his shoulder. She drops the jumper and clings to him, heaving gasping sobs she can’t breathe around, drowning in the flood of her own overwhelming feelings. Every time she thinks she might break the surface and be able to say something another wave hits her and she sinks again, down like a stone into dark cold lonely depths. Fitz holds her through the ebb and flow of weeping, stroking her hair and murmuring soothing half-sentences of comfort and calm. He probably says more than “I’m here,” but everything else blurs into that, only that. What more can he say? What more can she want?

Eventually, the sobs become shuddering sighs, which in turn become hiccoughs. Fitz releases her just enough to push her hair back from sticking to her cheeks. His eyes track thoughtfully over her face, assessing her stability without—she knows—encroaching on her privacy. “Do you want some water?” he asks, all practicality to cover his concern.

She does. She does not want to let him go. “No.”

“You should drink something, or you’ll have a headache.”

“I know. I will.”

He doesn’t believe her, but lets her be. His hand hasn’t left her hair. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not you, Fitz.”

It isn’t like her to cry when they argue, so he accepts that with only a little hesitance. “If it’s the darning, you don’t have to do it. I don’t mind wearing a jumper with holes in it, I swear.”

She smiles in spite of herself, in spite of the fact that she feels as though her emotions have been scooped out of her with a spoon. Loving Fitz, though, isn’t an emotion. “Darning is terrible,” she agrees. “But it isn’t the darning.”

“I didn’t think so.”

He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, his thumbs stroking gently and unconsciously over her shoulder blades. Letting her sore eyes close, she concentrates on the sensation, matching her inhales and exhales to the gentle sweep. If only they could stay just like this: careless of the woes and worries, just in this moment. Just...together.

But the darning still has to be done.

“Fitz?”

“Mm.”

“I can’t tell you why,” she says, emphasizing “can’t” so he hears it. She actually, literally, cannot explain herself just now. “But I must mend the hole.”

And then, because he is the best man there has ever been, he says, “all right,” and kisses her forehead, and sits with her for the whole hour it takes her to mend the not-yet hole, until one nearly couldn’t see where it was.

* * *

She expects he’ll want to talk about her crying jag eventually. He doesn’t walk gently around her, not exactly, but he’s more pensive than usual, more prone to let his shoulder brush hers, more firm about stopping work at decent times. Tiredly, she almost wishes he’d just pull off the plaster and have at it; she can scarcely cry more than she already did, and a delay won’t make a second round less likely. If they’re going to have another screaming match, at least they’ll both feel better at the end of it. So she almost feels relieved when he turns to her one afternoon and says, “hey, let’s knock off early today. I’ve got something I want to do.”

Whatever progress they’re making—not much—won’t be lost for five hours of work, so she says, “all right. Let me just finish recording this.”

He nods and disappears into the other room, giving her enough time to steel herself. Oblique conversation first, as always; then pointed comments; then raised voices and words that would hurt desperately if one wasn’t so occupied hurling hurtful words of one’s own. The making up will come quickly, but not quickly enough. Now it’s here, she realizes, she doesn’t want another fight after all.

Slowly shutting off the non-essential lights in the lab, she drags in to meet him. “Fitz, listen—”

“Or you could.”

His voice comes from the corner, followed by a small thump and then a strange whirring noise she can’t place. “Fitz, what—”

He steps aside, gesturing to the record player beside him with a silly but adorable flourish. As he does, crackling violins strike up a sweeping intro for a plummy-voiced woman who begins singing: “there’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover...”

“Fitz,” she says again. “What is this?”

“More preparation?” He tugs on his earlobe, looking at her sideways. “What if, um, what if you have to go to a party and there’s dancing? You haven’t practiced that. You think Deke would be any good at dancing?”

“Of a kind, perhaps.” She takes a step closer; he does the same. Even in her jeans and jumper she feels like she’s already gone back in time. “Not the kind you do to Dame Vera Lynn, though.”

“Recognized her right off, then.”

“My granny, though she didn’t wear pin curls or stockings, was known to be a bit sentimental when songs from her childhood played.”

He ignores her rather deliberate opening and holds out his hand, too tentative to be smooth but so _Fitz_ and therefore perfect. “Thought we could muddle through a bit, for the experience. You know. Practice so you can teach everyone else.”

“Is it really the best use of our time?”

His jaw tightens at that, but his hand remains steady. “Yeah, actually. You think I’m going to let some Hydra operative or, worse, Yank on leave have the first dance? Come on, Jemma. Dance with me.”

And, because the music is so wistful and his eyes are so blue and Granny doesn’t have a monopoly on sentimentality, she takes his hand and moves into his arms.

It takes them a minute to get the hang of it—they’ve watched a bit of Strictly in their time, but neither of them have ever done any dancing beyond the jumping wriggling shimmying kind one does when slightly tipsy and not even much of that. Before Dame Vera moves into the fourth verse, though, all limbs are comfortably placed and Jemma’s cheek rests against Fitz’s chin, and they are spinning in slow circles without tripping enough to notice.

_There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover..._

“But it’s the sea, isn’t it,” Fitz murmurs, “so are there bluebirds there? Wouldn’t the gulls, I don’t know, eat them?”

“It’s a metaphor, I think.”

_There’ll be love and laughter and peace ever after..._

Her smile drops off. As though he can feel her sudden tension, his hand on her back tugs her closer. “Or maybe,” he says, “it’s wishful thinking. That there could be a world where bluebirds could be everywhere. If you want that. Don’t know why you would.”

“Bluebirds mean happiness, I think. In mythology or something. I suppose during the war they would take happiness even if it didn’t make sense.”

“Like now.”

“Yes. Like now.”

_I may not be near, but I have no fear_

“Except.” He takes a deep breath. “I don’t want to fight, but we have to talk about it, Jemma, because you’re putting everything in your little box again. You don’t have to, you know? I’ve already seen everything ugly about you; you can’t scare me off.”

For some people, that would be a figure of speech. She closes her eyes against the memory of her nightmare self. Of course she can trust him to love her no matter what terrible thing she lets out—but this isn’t about him. Or, it is, but not like that.

“It’s just. I’ve never seen you cry like that.”

No, she supposed he hadn’t. She had never cried like that around him. She never had a reason to.

_When night shadows fall, I’ll always recall out there across the sea_...

“One of the nice things about having a husband, I understand, is that you can tell them when something is bothering you.”

“Ugh.” She ducks her forehead against his shoulder, not sure who she’s hiding from. “Not fair, Fitz.”

“Maybe, but I’m willing to do the wrong thing for the right reason sometimes.”

“And this is the right reason?”

“What’s a better reason?”

“Oh, Fitz. We have a million other things to worry about.”

“True. But you aren’t worried about them, you’re worried about something else.”

“Fitz...”

_There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover, tomorrow, just you wait and see!_

“You don’t have to tell me,” he says as the record needle scritches in the silence between two songs. “But I wish you would.”

He steps back, holding his hands palms up between them, in a simultaneous offer and plea, and his voice sounds like a pulled thread—nearly normal except for the tiny bit of tension that will, if not seen to, create a snag and then a hole. She could fix it then, too, but it’s better to stop the damage early. And then, if she’s honest: she’s more than one pulled thread herself. No one sews her up better than Fitz.

As a new song begins, she wraps her hands around her neck and closes her eyes:

_We’ll meet again, don’t where, don’t know when..._

The soft burble of Vera Lynn’s signature tune gives just enough space for her to come to the point she’s been avoiding since they started this whole thing: It won’t be easy, but she has to try. “I’m worrying about the darning because I’m trying not to worry about something else.”

“I know. Is it keeping everyone safe when you go? You’re not going to be safe no matter how perfect your hair is. We’d be better off designing time phasers or something.”

She shakes her head. His hands come to rest on her elbows.

“Is it figuring out the other stuff? Because we will, Jemma, eventually. We’ve always done it before, and we can just keep trying ‘til we get it right this time.”

“It isn’t that.”

“Well.” He chuckles, not meaning it. “Those were my best guesses, so.”

_I know we’ll meet again some sunny day!_

Of all the songs, she thinks. It’s not even slightly amusing, but she huffs a damp-sounding laugh. “No matter how much I prepare, I won’t be able to do it, Fitz.”

“Do what? Of course you can. Has there been anything you tried to do you haven’t been able to?”

“Hardly. No, truly, just _barely_ , and this—I’m so—” Now that they’ve been given permission, too many thoughts try to elbow their way to the front of the queue. She shakes her head again, trying to force them back into place. “Time travel, all right. I’ve been to several different galaxies; I expect I’ll manage the past. It’s not ideal, but I can push through. It’s just—”

When she opens her eyes, his are earnest and encouraging. He must understand by now, he must, but he stays quiet.

_Please say hello to the folks that I know, tell them I won’t be long..._

She puts her hands over his heart and grounds herself with its beat. “I’m trying to prepare myself to be separated from you. We’ve done it before, but I don’t want to do it again.”

His hands hold her tighter. “We’ll do the job and come back, you know. We’ve found each other every time before.”

“Even if you could promise that”—she feels a fresh wall of tears building, but manages to keep them at bay—“I’ll still have to be without you for God knows how long. So I’m trying to—”

“—prepare to be alone.” He nods. One of his hands comes up to cover hers. “And the sewing basket and the setting mousse—”

“Oh, a silly way to plan for every eventuality. Ridiculous, isn’t it? As though we could plan for any of it at all. What was it Hunter said? Make a plan, plan goes to rubbish—”

“Make a new plan.” The corner of his mouth quirks up. “And you will. If you have to. And in the meantime, we’ll think of every .0000000001% plan that exists and figure out a way around them. Enoch will help.”

“Even Enoch can’t see everything.”

“Sometimes,” he says, “I don’t know if you want me to talk you out of these kinds of things or sit with you in them. Do you?”

“No.”

“No.” Looking down at their hands, he taps his thumb thoughtfully. “Look, It’s not that I don’t know what you mean. I do. Can’t say I’m looking forward to it either.”

“The other day you said you wished it would be done already.”

A snort of disbelief. “ _Done_ , Jemma. I wish the whole thing would be over and we would be together with nothing hanging over our heads for _once_ in our life. I don’t wish this part would end.”

That makes far more sense than the way she originally interpreted it—though even then a small part of her brain knew he would never say such a thing—and she offers a silent apology. He accepts it, pulling her back into an embrace. “There’s a thing I keep thinking about—don’t know where I heard it—‘redeeming the time’. It’s stuck in my head like a song I only kind of know—do you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” she says with her face buried in his shoulder. “I think it’s from Shakespeare. Or maybe the Bible?”

“Doesn’t matter. What it means matters. I think of it like, this time we’re in is damned stressful and could be really miserable. Sometimes it is no matter what we do. But it’s still time we’re together, yeah? And that’s something we haven’t had a lot of. So it’s got its redeeming qualities. That’s what I’ve got to concentrate on, or I’ll go mental.”

She had done the same, at the beginning, before everything got so heavy. Or, perhaps, before she had taken all the weight upon herself. “And when it’s done, Fitz? I know we’ve still got loads to do, but however much time we have left, it isn’t going to be enough. There isn’t enough time.”

The truth: a hundred thousand years might not be enough time.

_We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when..._

“There’s not,” he says. “But time is a construct, anyway. Each moment as you experience exists and then is gone, that’s all, no matter how long the successive moments go on for. They all exist at once, and they don’t all exist, and that’s how it is. You know this.”

“Is that meant to be encouraging?”

“Well.” Slowly, he starts swaying back and forth, moving them back into an achingly careful dance. “If you think about it. That means that even when you’re living a moment without me, you’re also living this one right now, slow dancing like a cliché couple to a song from the Second World War in a jumper you’ve put all the buttons on twice. That’s not so bad, is it?”

_Keep smiling through, just like you always do, ’til the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away...we’ll meet again some sunny day!_

Fitz and his simple science, Fitz and his optimistic realism, Fitz and his steady refusal to do anything other than believe in them. Just, _Fitz_. She will be utterly lost without him, she knows, but he’s right. Of course he’s right. They can’t let the dreadful moments to come spoil the marvelous ones they have been given now. The inescapable truth that one’s stockings will eventually ladder is no reason not to wear them. All the preparation in the world can’t stop things from happening; the secret is knowing how to fix them when they do. And Fitz, perhaps by accident but more likely entirely, precisely on purpose, has just given her the pins and needles she needs to mend herself when things fall apart.

The record comes to a triumphant end and slips out of the groove, leaving nothing more than a _whir-whir_ to fill the space. No more is needed; their hearts are all ready full.

“No,” she says quietly. “It’s not so bad at all.”

He says nothing, just pulls her tighter, and they sway in the center of the room to the sound of their breath and nothing else.

They haven’t got enough time, not really. But in this timeless moment, they have all the time in the world. 


End file.
